The Trump Afterlife

We are in the last days of Donald Trump, presidential candidate. But as his defeat becomes more assured, the anxiety about his political afterlife is mounting. Liberals fear a world where he refuses to concede and his supporters turn to violence. Conservatives fear a world where the Republican Party remains imprisoned in his short-fingered grasp. Fox News executives fear a world where Trump starts a cable channel and steals their audience out from under them. And his supporters imagine that like a populist Obi-Wan Kenobi, he will rise more powerful than before.

There is no question that Trump will haunt the country, and especially the Republican Party, long after the votes are counted on Nov. 8. But the Trump phenomenon will not sustain itself automatically at anything like this scale, and there are ways in which Trump could fade into the celebrity-industrial background of our culture rather more swiftly than many people think.

Start with the worst-case scenario for the election, from the point of view of civics and civil peace: Trump refuses to concede defeat, rants about voter fraud, denounces Republican officialdom for betraying him, and urges his supporters to storm polling places and take to the streets. It’s possible to imagine this message leading to spasms of violence, and thence to a future of armed clashes between Trumpist militias and left-wing protesters like the ones who flooded Trump’s Chicago rally earlier this year. (The Week’s Damon Linker imagines something along these apocalyptic lines in a recent column.)

But if Trump loses in three weeks by the largest landslide in post-Reagan political history, it’s also possible that such a “to the barricades” rant could look a bit, well, ridiculous even to his deepest-dyed supporters. Not that some of them won’t embrace conspiracy theories and cheer on a Trumperdammerung online. But it’s not clear that the keyboard warfare and Twitter anti-Semitism of some of Trump’s supporters translate into a widespread appetite for flesh-and-blood confrontations with either law enforcement or the left.

Yes, his rallies have been ugly, but there’s a big difference between sucker-punching a protester when you’re in the midst of a like-minded crowd and a street fight, Weimar-style, with people who might punch or shoot back. The only time a Trump rally almost turned into a riot was in the Chicago case, when it was anti-Trump activists more than the rallygoers who seemed to come spoiling for a fight; the most recent act of actual election-year violence was a firebombing of a Trump campaign headquarters by persons unknown.

The Republican nominee’s base is senior citizens, not the testosterone-addled young. How many of them are actually ready to rumble at Roger Stone’s command? If the answer is “not very many,” then you could easily imagine Trump overplaying his hand in an anti-concession speech, and inadvertently revealing that his right-wing populism is more virtual, more reality-television, than the 1930s variety.

This may explain the appeal of a postelection pivot back into the virtual, in the form of some kind of Trump TV. And again, it’s possible to imagine a darkly influential trajectory for such a network, in which it dominates the conservative entertainment landscape, race-baits and stirs outrage nightly, and so terrifies Republicans that Washington becomes more ungovernable than ever. Silvio Berlusconi, Trump’s Italian counterpart, used TV dominance as a springboard into political power; perhaps Trump can use a start-up network as a place to park his ambitions and his audience until 2020 rolls around.

Except that building a TV network from scratch is a tough job (even if you poach Sean Hannity as your Caesar Flickerman), and the kind of project that tends to require a substantial upfront investment (not words that Trump likes to hear). Unlike Fox News when it started, Trump wouldn’t be filling a gaping right-of-center void; he’d be trying to cannibalize part of the Fox audience, swiping its Hannity demographic and adding in some InfoWars viewers, which would mean competing in a very crowded landscape for not-exactly-certain returns.

So Trump TV might make more sense, as Derek Thompson of The Atlantic and others have pointed out, as a subscription service — a paid digital TV network (with a Breitbart-ish website attached) along the lines of Glenn Beck’s up-and-down experiment The Blaze. But under that model, even if it succeeded as a financial proposition, Trump would be forfeiting the hope of anything close to Fox-size viewership for his nightly fireside chats; he would risk becoming a niche celebrity even within the conservative firmament, which might be fatal to any permanent “leader of the opposition” ambitions.

Here Beck’s example is instructive: When he left Fox for The Blaze, he went from being the leading Wild Man of the histrionic anti-Obama right to being just one conservative media personality among many. (In fairness, he also mellowed considerably.) Another instructive example is Sarah Palin, who went from icon to afterthought fairly quickly following the 2008 campaign.

Trump is far bigger than Beck and far more media-savvy than Palin; he’s sustained his own celebrity for a very long time. But sustaining power is a different matter, requiring different strengths.

If Trump really wanted to bestride the post-2016 G.O.P. like an orange colossus, neither Trump militias nor Trump TV are the natural path. Instead, he would be better served behaving like, well, a semi-normal political leader — deploying himself as the voice of Trumpism on the existing cable networks, finding or recruiting a set of younger politicians to carry the Trumpist banner in 2018, supporting efforts to fund-raise and build out the infrastructure for a Trumpist equivalent of the netroots or the Tea Party, and (since he’s not getting any younger) auditioning a smoother political apprentice to fill his shoes in 2020.

And the fact that exactly none of these sound like the Trump we know so well is the best reason to suspect that he won’t be as influential over the next four years as a lot of people fear. The things that would really maximize his influence, like the things that would have made him a competitive presidential candidate in 2016, are all things that he may be temperamentally incapable of doing.